NEW YORK (1010 WINS/AP) -- Rep. Lee Zeldin told 1010 WINS on Friday that he saw “red flags” as a man lunged at him with a claw-like weapon during an upstate campaign rally.
Zeldin, who is the GOP candidate for New York governor, was addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in the town of Perinton, outside Rochester, Thursday evening when the man climbed onto a stage where the candidate was speaking.
“I saw someone come onto the stage in my peripheral, but it wasn’t until he got a little bit closer that there were a few red flags that went off,” Zeldin told 1010 WINS Newsline with Brigitte Quinn.
Video from NBC affiliate WHEC-TV shows a man trying to grab Zeldin and bringing a pointed object shaped like a cat's head towards his neck. Photos of the object suggested it was a keychain meant to be worn on the knuckles for self-defense.
“I saw first and foremost, most importantly, that he had something in his hand,” Zeldin said. “That it was similar to brass knuckles, where two of his fingers were through the two holes of this weapon. And there were two pointy ends coming out of the weapon.”
“Once he started lunging towards my neck area with it, I just very quickly grabbed his wrist,” the congressman continued. “And I just needed a few moments of holding his wrist there before everybody else jumped on and basically tackled him down to the ground and was able to subdue him.”
Zeldin, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who has represented eastern Long Island in Congress since 2015, said he also noticed his attacker had a veteran's hat on.
“It was interesting, because while I was seeing the red flag of the weapon, and he was also saying to me, ‘You’re done,’ I was also noticing that he was wearing a veteran’s hat,” Zeldin said. “And usually in life when I see somebody wearing a veteran’s hat, my guard is dropped as low as it can get, but in this particular case, I was noticing he was wearing a veteran’s hat at the same exact time as picking up these other signals.”
Zeldin said he heard the man was intoxicated at the time, and that may have slowed him down.
“I was told that he was under the influence, that he was drunk,” he said. “That might have impacted the speed at which he was coming at me a bit.”
Zeldin said he suffered “a few scrapes, nothing too bad.” He said he took a few photos of the scrapes at the request of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
The suspect, 43-year-old David Jakubonis, was arraigned on an attempted assault charge and then released on his own recognizance.
After the attack, Zeldin predicted on Twitter that his alleged attacker would be “instantly released under New York’s laws.”
“I don’t believe that New York’s cashless bail laws are making New York any safer,” the rep told 1010 WINS. “I have huge concerns with the impact.”
“You just can’t be going around trying to stab, not just members of Congress, but anybody for that matter,” he said. “And I believe you shouldn’t just be instantly released on cashless bail.”
Zeldin, who will face Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul in the election this fall, has a number of campaign events planned Friday and through the weekend, all part of his “Unite to Fire Hochul” bus tour.
He had already held a morning event by the time he spoke to WINS on Friday. He said “security was too light” at Thursday's event but that it had been “ramped up” on Friday.
The alleged attacker in Thursday’s incident is an Army veteran who was deployed to Iraq in 2009 as a medical laboratory technician, according to the Associated Press. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he has an attorney who can speak for him. A message seeking comment was left at a number listed for him by the AP.
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